Craig Hockenberry: "Two reasons Steve did the keynote today: 1) To tell his competitors to fuck off. 2) To tell those speculating about his health to fuck off."
Robert Scoble: "I've been watching Jobs for the entire keynote. Even when he's back stage. He's been standing the entire time, looks healthier than me."
To be fair, if someone was in truly poor health or undergoing radical chemotherapy, standing at length would likely be either incredibly difficult or impossible.
So sure, it's not fool proof, but its also not a bad indication that reports of his impending demise are exaggerated.
When my dad eventually succumbed to cancer (technically kidney failure), it wasn't until the last couple of weeks or so that he had energy and weakness issues. Even a month before, he was still out and about. With chemo, he was only weak for the day of, and fine the next day. I wouldn't say Job's apparent health can give any clues as to his health, aside from the fact he has at least another month left.
Congrats to Steve and the Apple team. The iPad 2 is a phenomenal product. 33% thinner design in less than a year since it was first released. And crazy cool covers as a bonus.
Being thinner should allow for a better grip -- especially for little hands. My totally unscientific reasoning is the more efficiently you can transfer the weight into your fingers (being spread wider) the more comfortable it will be to hold the weight. This can also help with wrist fatigue if it allows you to find a more comfortable resting position. Lastly the sharper angle on the back should make it easier to lift when sitting flat on a surface. Perhaps all small things but for hours of usage it can add up.
Seeing as they were already setting the bar for tablets they could afford to make it thicker that they needed to. In all likelihood it was more of an economic consideration, larger components being cheaper, but knowing they had the ability to make it thinner and lighter later would have been part of the medium term plans.
Competitors’ tablets aren’t any thinner. That’s what you would expect if Apple had made the first iPad purposefully thicker than they could have done.
They probably didn’t spend much time optimizing the thickness the first time around. I would guess that they made a ton of dummy mockups, figured out some sort of maximum thickness to still get a compelling product and designed the first iPad with that goal in mind.
Could they have released a thinner iPad last year? Probably, but it might well have taken them a few months longer. It’s simply a matter of priorities. You can’t do everything.
I don’t for one second believe that they already had the design for a thinner iPad drawn up and added some thickness in the last minute just to make their job easier.
Actually, at very high volumes (where the non-recurring engineering cost is sufficiently amortized), the larger equivalent component is more expensive, since you are using more material to manufacture the component.
Obviously, other factors, like process yield can be a factor here as well, since a lower process yield for the smaller component would increase its price.
I knew a guy that used to apply this principle to coding. He'd put a bunch of while loops counting from one to a gazillion that could be removed at a later time during "optimization".
Well, the camera was left out of the first version for that reason (presumably). Remember the slot left in the back of the bezel that took a standard iPod sized camera module?
I think this is potentially a mistake, it furthers (in my opinion) the image that Jobs is irreplaceable (being on a medical leave of absence he must still come back to launch products, etc.).
Oh man I could make a really nasty joke about Steve Jobs and the iPad being 33% thinner. But I won't.
It does look like he's lost weight but Jobs has always been skinny, so I don't think it's fair to speculate on how healthy he really is. I really hope he's doing well.
http://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/43030854980730881